"The history of Chicago's hospitals begins with an almshouse established by
Cook County as part of its responsibility to provide care for indigent or homeless county residents, and for sick
or needy travelers. Located at the corner of Clark and Randolph streets, this public charity was in operation as
early as 1835. It did provide medical attendance, but such places typically crowded the ill together with the healthy
poor, the insane, and persons who were permanently incapacitated.

Cholera had hit the area in 1832, and smallpox and scarlet fever were familiar to many. By 1843 fear of epidemic
prompted city officials to build the first institution devoted exclusively to medical care in Chicago, a small
wooden structure located on the far northern border of the city. Ironically, it was built on land bought for a
cemetery. This first “hospital,” a frame structure at North Avenue and the lakeshore in what would become Lincoln
Park, was designed to keep victims of contagious disease away from the center of population. Rebuilt after a fire,
in 1852 it began to segregate smallpox cases from cholera cases, but when cholera threatened Chicago in 1854, the
city council authorized a separate [though only temporary] hospital at 18th and LaSalle streets. The city kept
the smallpox hospital at North Avenue and even built a two-story building there, but it perished in the fire of
1871. Beginning in 1874, a series of new hospitals to isolate contagious diseases was built on the Southwest Side
of the city, near the courthouse at 26th and California.

Institutions like the smallpox hospital and the temporary cholera hospital were not meant to be locations of general
medical care and as early as 1837, citizens were suggesting the city build a general hospital. It was not until
a decade later, however, that both city and county officials worked with physicians from Rush Medical College to
establish the first such hospital in the area, at North Water and Dearborn streets. Newly opened and seeking students,
Rush College wanted a hospital to fill a need for clinical education. Rush provided the doctors, the county supplied
the medicine, and the city paid for the building rental. However, it soon became evident that the accommodations
were inadequate for the large number and variety of patients, and the hospital went out of business.

Rush physicians soon incorporated another general hospital, called the Illinois General Hospital of the Lakes, which
opened in 1850 with 12 beds in the old Lake House Hotel at Rush and North Water Streets. The charge was three dollars
per week per patient. The doctors asked the Sisters of Mercy, a Roman Catholic order, to provide nursing care,
and in the spring of 1851 transferred control to the Sisters. With a new charter, the hospital was renamed Mercy Hospital. Cook County supervisors paid Mercy
to care for county patients. The oldest continuously running hospital in Chicago, it moved in 1853 to a new building
at Wabash and Van Buren and in 1863 was relocated to its present campus at 26th and Calumet.

1909
Mercy Hospital
2537 South Prairie Avenue

Rush College retained the privilege of teaching medical students there until 1859,
when Mercy switched affiliation to the Chicago Medical School (later known as Northwestern University Medical School).

Medical sectarians, some with unorthodox therapeutic practices, founded their
own hospitals, such as the Hahnemann
Hospital, which opened in the early 1850s.......

Friction between the homeopath and "regular" medical practitioners became
a political battle in 1857, when the former sought representation on the medical staff of what was to be the new
city hospital at 18th and LaSalle
streets.

The argument prevented the institution from opening until 1859, when Rush faculty members rented it for use as
a private hospital. In 1862, the U.S. Army commandeered it for a military hospital, until the Civil War ended and
the county leased it. Cook County finally had a relatively permanent hospital.

As the number of charity cases grew, however, the old building proved too small, and County Hospital moved to new pavilions at
the present site at Wood and Harrison Streets in 1876. Larger structures replaced these beginning in 1912, and
these in turn were replaced in the first years of the twenty-first century.

1911Exterior view of Cook County Hospital, looking down a street toward the
front and entrance of the hospital building located on West Harrison Street in the Near West Side community area
of Chicago, Illinois.

In 1847 a Chicago physician built a private retreat for the insane just north
of the city, and in 1854, when the county moved its almshouse to a site known as “Dunning”, 12 miles northwest
of the city, an asylum was among the buildings constructed. Authorities transferred this asylum, the Cook County Hospital for the Insane, to the care
of the state of Illinois in 1912, and the name changed to Chicago State
Hospital.

Institutional efforts against tuberculosis began with the Chicago
Tuberculosis Institute, which established the Edward
Sanatorium in 1907.

Edward Sanatorium, 1916 (Naperville, IL)

The Municipal Tuberculosis Sanitarium, funded by the city, opened in 1915 at Crawford and Bryn Mawr Avenues.

Exterior view of several of the cottages on the grounds of the Chicago Municipal
Tuberculosis Sanitarium, located at North Crawford and West Bryn Mawr Avenues in the North Park community area
of Chicago, Illinois. The sanitarium was opened to the public on February 16, 1915.

Exterior view of the U. S. Veterans Hospital in North Chicago, Illinois

To care for sick and injured sailors who worked on the Great Lakes, the federal government
set up a hospital in 1852 on the grounds of Fort Dearborn. It later moved north of the city to what became the
Uptown neighborhood.

After World War I, the United States Public Health Service established several large hospitals, forerunners of
present-day Veteran's Hospitals. The Hines
facility in Maywood was among the largest

St. Luke's Hospital, a charity of Grace Episcopal Church on the Near South Side, began in 1865 in a small
frame structure at 8th and State Streets, eventually moving into larger buildings on south Indiana and Michigan
Avenues. The hospital remained at that site for almost a century, merging in 1956 with Presbyterian
Hospital and Rush Medical College on the Near West Side.

1908
1439 S. Michigan Avenue

Lutheran pastor William Passavant established the 15-bed
Deaconess Hospital at Dearborn and Ontario Streets in 1865. Destroyed
by the 1871 fire, in 1884 it reopened at Dearborn and Superior as the Emergency
Hospital, later named Passavant
after its founder.

In 1920, Northwestern University Medical School adopted Emergency as a site for clinical
instruction. Methodist Wesley Memorial Hospital,
established in 1888, joined Passavant as part of Northwestern's Chicago campus in 1941.

The Alexian
Brothers, a Roman Catholic male nursing order originating during the
bubonic plague of the thirteenth century, started a small hospital for males in 1866. Its first substantial building
was at Dearborn and Schiller. After two years, Alexian moved to larger quarters at North and Franklin. It rebuilt
after the fire, moving in 1896 to Belden and Racine and then to Elk Grove Village in 1966.

The Sisters of Charity began St. Joseph's
Hospital in Lake View in 1868. It now serves the community from a modern
high-rise building at Diversey Avenue near the lake. (2900 N. Lake Shore)

Other early Catholic hospitals were St. Elizabeth's,
founded near Western and Division in 1887 by the Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ, and St.
Mary of Nazareth Hospital, established in 1894 by the Sisters of the Holy
Family of Nazareth in the same neighborhood. St. Mary's served the Polish-speaking immigrant community. (note: 2233 W. Division St)

Early Chicago Jews founded a hospital at LaSalle and Schiller in 1866. Like nearby Alexian Brothers, this institution
fell victim to the fire, but Jewish Hospital
did not rebuild immediately. The family of philanthropist Michael Reese made large contributions, and the hospital bearing his name arose in 1882 at Ellis Avenue
and 29th Street (Douglas Community area), becoming by 1950 the largest charity-sponsored hospital in Chicago, with
718 beds. The increasing population of Jews on Chicago's Near Southwest Side prompted the opening of Mt. Sinai Hospital near Douglas Park in 1919 (note:
2750 W. 15th Pl).

The influx of German immigrants into the Chicago area led to the
1883 founding of the German Hospital.

Baptists established the Chicago Baptist
Hospital in 1891, and Methodists founded Bethany
Methodist.

By 1897, Lutherans had built Augustana, Swedish
Covenant, the Norwegian-American
Hospital, and the Lutheran Deaconess
Home and Hospital (closed c. 1958). Early twentieth-century Catholic groups
started St. Anne's (located at
4950 W. Thomas St), St. Bernard's (located
at 6337 S. Harvard Ave), and Columbus hospitals.

In 1865, Mary Harris Thompson founded the Chicago Hospital for Women and Children, chiefly
to serve widows and orphans of Civil War victims. Renamed the Mary Thompson
Hospital when she died in 1895, it opened on Rush Street, then moved to
West Adams Street.

Exterior view of Dr. Mary Thompson Hospital for Women and Children, located at 1712 West Adams Street in the Near
West Side community area of Chicago, Illinois.

Julia F. Porter endowed the Maurice Porter
Memorial Free Hospital for Children in 1882 in memory of her son. In 1903
it took the name Children's Memorial.

Children's Memorial Hospital
The hospital was located at 735 Fullerton Avenue in the Lincoln Park community area of Chicago, Illinois.

Joseph B. De Lee founded the Chicago Lying-In Hospital and Dispensary in 1895 in a tenement house on Maxwell Street in an effort to lower the high neonatal
mortality rates. [Note: Later constructed at 5038 South Vincennes, 1929; Later located at 5845 S. Maryland)]

The Martha Washington Hospital
advertised itself as a haven for alcoholics, and the Frances E. Willard
National Temperance Hospital, named after the famous temperance advocate
from Evanston, was for nondrinkers. It was dedicated to proving that diseases could be cured without the use of
alcohol or alcohol-based medicines.

Until the mid-twentieth century, many Chicago hospitals refused to treat African
American patients or employ black doctors and nurses. Daniel Hale Williams, one of the first African American surgeons
in Chicago, organized Provident Hospital in
1891 in an effort to ensure hospital services to African Americans in Chicago and to provide black health care
workers a place to practice and learn.

1942
Provident Hospital

Beginning in the last decade of the nineteenth century, groups of physicians and
physician-entrepreneurs established for-profit hospitals such as the Lakeside
Hospital, Garfield Park Hospital, Westside Hospital, and Jefferson Park Hospital. Later examples of this
type included North Chicago, Washington Park, Ravenswood, South Shore,
Washington Boulevard, Burnside, Chicago General, John B. Murphy, and Belmont hospitals. Most of these were small and
some lasted only a few years. Others became nonprofit institutions and continued to serve without investor ownership.

By 1950, with a population of 3.6 million, Chicago had 84 hospitals, including public and private sanatoria. The
majority were nonprofit, receiving major funding from patient fees (often at least partly paid by insurance), donations,
and endowments.